“Canned Gods” began with this observation: sound effects librairies on compact discs, the ones used in the movie industry or for radio plays, double up as cultural dictionaries. Each sound library presents the most important sounds for the culture that chose them. An example: one of the american sound library offers a huge number of car sounds, while the BBC s has maybe a dozen of them, while the latter has a number of field recordings from foreign colonies which do not appear on the American sound effects cds…even the form of presentation of these sounds (their length, order, etc…) is different.

When considering these collections globally, one gets the feeling that they are some sort of an audio picture box or an audio picture book that presents a culture or a country.

Thus, my idea has been to take one of these audio librairies and to use these sounds to trace a portrait of the culture from its own material.

“Canned Gods: a typical afternoon in the backyard in Phoenix, Arizona” is the result of a first attempt with this approach applied to the United States.